So you may be wondering “who the hell is this Steve Wozniak guy, and why have i not heard of him”? well that’s understandable, even though this guy is a hero in my eyes beyond that of any Steve Jobs or Bill gates, the reason you don’t hear so much about him is because he is too busy getting shit done, literally. He had been so busy working away behind the scenes, developing newer and better products that he never even came up to say hello, plus he has one of those stereo typical data, programmer type personalities that make him a bit of an introvert (though you wouldn’t guess it from seeing him at the even yesterday in Sydney).

Steve Wozniak was quite literally the brains behind personal computing, he was the designer, creator and builder of the first apple computers and one of if not the most innfluetnail people behind computers today. There is no doubt that without Steve I would not be typing on a laptop as advanced as the one I am using right now.

So what did he talk about? For the most part he spoke about his incredible life journey and what he learned. He also spoke about his experience with being innovative, why being innovative is important and how to do it. On a side note I noticed that at the event I was like the only person who showed up with a pad and pen and bothered to take notes, I don’t understand how anyone is supposed to get any value out of an event like this without writing anything down?

Any way here are my take aways on innovation and business. If you want to know about his life story he has a book called: iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It there is just to much to cover in a blog post.

Innovation:

When your company has success from its first product, and begins to generate healthy income you must reinvest that income into innovation (in the same area you have skills in) or you will quickly be left behind. An example of this is Nokia, they once dominated the mobile market with an 85% market share. But one day this number plummeted dramatically. Nokia was not even close to hanging on because they they had not invested in innovation.
Steve mentioned that innovation is often viral and takes you by surprise. If you can picture a test tube that is seeded with a virus that doubles in size every minute and takes 12 hours to take over the whole tube how much is taken over after 11.59? One minute shy of total takeover? 50%. how much after just 11.56? 1/16 th! so just 4 minutes before total take over the virus is barley visible! No wonder company like Nokia didn’t see it coming.

A company must have a culture of innovation from the ground up. it cant only be the CEO it must be ingrained in the company culture. Ask yourself the question are the individuals in your organisation always looking for: New, Different, Powerful, Innovative and Risky? (Be honest with yourself).

You success of failure may often rest on the shoulders of one staff member. This staff member will be the one who’s passion is inline with your companies product (e.g. Steve Wozniak). You will know this staff member because he will do in his spare time what you have at work. (Steve used to build PC on the weekend because he loved it). He says that you want to give this staff member everything, buy him a house if need be because he is the one that will generate the leading innovation that the rest of the company will follow.

You want to be giving people resources (for free) for them to develop personal projects that are in line with the companies products, often this is where the cutting edge changes will come from.

Steve believes (as did Jobs) that innovation is built into people from an early age about 20. They will have an attitude of challenging the status quo, and doing things very different a need to be the best there is at what they do and willing to be wrong.

Lastly he said that innovation is an Art form. it often cannot be written about, it is the equivalent of trying to write to someone to tell them how good a song is and expect them to understand. It is never going to happen their are just to many elements to outline. Only once the person has heard the song will they truly know if they liked it or not.

General Business:

Ask yourself who is your product for? Have a person that is similar to those people making the end decisions. E.g. If you product is for programmers and introverts, then have a programmer introvert type person making the decisions because they understand their needs.

The computer industry is still moving faster than ever before, don’t be fooled into thinking it is slowing down. People who are innovative will always win in these conditions.

Above everything else Steve is an inspiration to all to do what you love and all the riches you need in the world will come your way.

So that’s it. I hope you got some insight out of it. If you have any other questions please don’t hesitate to ask away.

Love the girl who says Fiverr FTW! hahahaha.

Firstly is has now officially been coined the “Penguin” update  (where in gods name is google finding these names).

I am certain through assessing many a penalised website (actually pages, the penalties seem to be mostly page level but a lot of home page penalties) that the root causes are:

• Links in content irrelevant to anchor and linked to site, this to an extent will include spun content I believe this is the next thing to be hit hard but that’s a whole nother post).
• Participation in networks such as Build my rank, High PR Society, Authority Link Network and the list goes on, you get the gist, basically any de-indexed blog syndication network.
• Unnatural Link Anchor Text profile: I have studied natural anchor text profiles for years, and I am yet to see a link builder even come close to replicating a natural one. I too am guilty of this because I get an opportunity to get a link on a pr7 site or something and I can help but put my exact main keyword in there. In turn all my best links have the exact main keywords in them, very unnatural. Also though many link builders do use, click here, nice site, image links, the url and so on as anchors but it is never anywhere near enough, 70% of your anchor profile should be made up of this stuff and not just the low quality links. And lastly keyword variation, I know you have probably heard it before but from what I see no one is listening. If you targeting the term “widgets” you need to build a list of at least 100 variation e.g: “how to use widget”, “blue widget”, “green widget”, “new widget”, “old widget”, “australian widget” and so on until you have 100.

I am probably going to get flamed for saying this but I personally think this update it on the right track, Google needs to combat web spam somehow. It is not fair on the people doing the right thing and I think this update was long overdue. I have had two businesses chopped out from under me, so I feel others pain and frustration yet I still side with Google on this.

I know for a fact that my competitors were actively building forum spam, guestbook spam and blog syndication spam to my site, with duplicate and spun irrelevant content and I new about this a long time ago, but could do nothing about it.

What would be nice is if Google provided me with interface (possibly in webmaster tools) to submit these links for exclusion so they do not result in a penalty later. I could have saved both my businesses from total collapse. I dont believe this would be a huge task for them to integrate and I hope they have something in the pipeline because I can keep investing thousands of dollars into quality promotion only to have it undermined by less skilled people.

If your site has been done over there is an option to submit for re inclusion here. You can also report spam though the same form.

As a side note, if you google adwords account got banned at the same time as you received a penalty, the reason is because “you are spamming the internet” according to Google but again a whole nother post for that one.

Peace

Si

My inbox had one email from a friend linking to this post by Matt Cutts: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html

My 2 cents would be that link builders will need to move to targeting less keywords on a page and put in that little bit more effort to make sure the anchors are relevant to the sentence content.

Already after only a few hours of this update being released I am seeing literally hundreds of black hatters posting about their sites getting axed, this is way bigger than panda and whatever that last web spam update was, way bigger!

My personal experience has been that many of my sites have made significant gains, however some have been slapped with plus 20′s to plus 50′s. Only time will tell what the main cause of these drops were.

Though this post may sound negative, I am honestly just revelling in it, I love new challenges, and changes. While most people will be getting disheartened by this update I will be researching, reading and discussing among other web marketers the new approaches to doing SEO, which will put me even further ahead of everyone else! I hope that if you have been penalised in any way you can muster the same head space.

I would strongly suggest you check your site out now, let me know if you find anything.

P.S make sure you also update to the latest version of wordpress if you use it. There is a lot of hacking scripts going around at the mo that are taking sites out left right and centre, the latest update fixes most of it.

Cheers,

Si

I may have the largest list of hand built web 2.0 properties any of us have ever seen but I also have the highest income of anyone I know and serp result I never dreamed I could get.

Anyhow giving back… I am sure many of you would agree that one of the most common mistakes link builders make is getting caught up in confusion, the latest toys and simply not getting shit done. If you really want to make a living online you gotta get shit done.

I was forever confused about what I should be exploring and learning in the link building world, like many I got so caught up in trying new stuff I never got anyhting done at all, much of what I was doing was overlapping and just a total mess, jumping from one thing to the next. I think what got me caught up more than anything was simply that I never had a clear direction on where I was trying to get to, no clear target in sight, which often left me feeling overwhelmed, confused and worst of all I felt like I was going backwards. I would be working on 4-5 link building apps or services a day and then the next day I would be working on 4-5 different ones… sound familiar? for your sake I hope not.

Now days is a totally different story, I have a mental organisation of what I’m learning, where it applies and how far along I am in mastering that particular area. I have cancelled near 80% of my paid subscriptions yet I am getting exponentially better results than I was before because I am constantly doing something to move closer to my objectives.

I think that one of the things that really got me going in a new direction was simply creating an excel spread sheet that separated all the different types of links and outlined how to target them. this gave me a clear mental picture of everything link building. This enabled me to then build a monthly plan for each of my sites on what needed to be done to beat my competitors.

So anyway that’s what I have to share, as un-sexy and un-complicated as it is, it made a big difference to me and hopefully it will have some use for some of you. (There is a key for the acronyms at the bottom of the page).

Looking at your link building efforts in this way also helps you to ensure you are always getting good link variation which is imperative in avoiding a penalty.

I though I would share it here both for your benefit but also in a hope that some may contribute to it, I dont think I would have thought of every link type and platform, in fact I think that after I built this spreadsheet, I got the clarity that I needed and just started working, I never had time to go back and mess around with a spreadsheets any more so it is probably fairly incomplete.

Key:

So I am a big fan of directory submissions, especially when it comes to client work. Mostly because of the mass IP, Domain referral and platform variation they provide and lastly they help enormously with google places listings if your including a physical address.

Additionally I think directory submissions even mass directory submissions fly strait under the google penalty radar simply because legitimate business and inexperienced webmaster put a lot of effort into getting lots of these when they first come to the scene because it is a natural flow on from traditional media mentality “get in all the local papers and directories” and lastly, in my experience people are not exploiting directory listings to the extent of other platforms, sure most people hit them once or twice to get a few hundred listings but no one is utilising large amount of resources over a long period of time hitting directories, meaning that it is less likley for google to go after someone doing it and the poeple who own directories are not spending all their time and money trying to keep spammers out making it relativly easy to get them. Many online directory sites dont even have captcha’s!

As long as you take into account a couple precautionary measures like hitting your local domain extension properties first (e.g. .com.au for Australia or .co.uk for the UK) variate your description text a lot, dont hit 10k in one fell swoop and variate the directory platforms your targeting you’ll be flying like a stealth bomber, dropping bomb’s like Hiroshima.

I have been playing around with Sliq Submitter a lot over the last couple months, it comes pre loaded with around 2k directories but you will only get reported success in about 1400.

Its got a couple negatives:
One it does not allow you to spin your descriptions, this makes variating your listings descriptions a HUGE time consuming task
Secondly as far as I can tell it is only compatible with one directory platform PHPLD or PHP Link Directory (the foot print is “Powered by: php Link Directory”)
And lastly it does not check if the links are actually approved and so it does not give you any reports that give you the actual location of the listings, it reports how many success but how many of those actually are I have no idea (wait they do have a . I did try it on a new domain and it does get quite a few indexed.

On the positive side its a very strait forward and simple tool to use, a total idiot could work it out and it is very intuitive in the way that it selects categories. Also works with captcha sniper but thats not a big deal when your only hitting 2k properties. it does have a new feature where it will go out and check the directories it has posted to for your link but its very slow and tediouse.

Anyway using hrefer (you could use scrape box also) I scraped some properties based on about 12 directory platforms (footprints below) and was able to generate a list of over 3k local directories (.com.au domains only, let me know if you want the list) with little to no effort but Sliq only accepted 7 of these

This forces me to find an alternate solution, possibly GSA submitter or one of the other 50 directory submissions software’s out there then again it may be easier to use Xrumer mods or training Zenno poster (or even scrapebox again if that’s your fancy). What is going to be difficult is mimicking the category selection algorithm that apps like Sliq do so well.

Ultimately I would like to hit many more directory platforms, and I know is not that difficult. I think this is a great way to get local links and diversity which are both super important now days, especially when working with the big G.

I will be sure to report back soon when I found the solution.

Has anyone successfully used something like Xrumer or Zenno poster to do directory submissions? if so I look forward to hearing about how you did it.

Directory Footprints:
“Powered by: php Link Directory”
“powered by PHPLD”
“Powered by WSN Links”
“powered by PHP Weby”
“Powered by cpLinks”
“Powered by cpDynaLinks”
“powered by BosDirectory”
“Powered by Link manager LinkMan”
“Powered by Gossamer Links”
“Powered by K-Links”
“Powered by In-Link”
“Powered by eSyndiCat Directory Software”
“Powered by: qlWebDS Pro”
“Powered by Directory software by LBS”
“powered by phpMyDirectory.com”
“Powered by HubDir PHP directory script”
“powered by BizDirectory”
“Powered by Free Directory Submissions”
“Powered by the original Free Article Directory”

There is definitely something a little fishy going on with this update, in previous updates all of y domains would remain fairly stable I would have made one or two domains go up and another one or two go down but only a spot or two, this time 90% of my domains have moved! and not only a spot or two some have shifted dramatically 5 point of page rank in some cases.

The Two Extremes:

Substantial Loss:

On the extreme end of the losses I have had several domains drop from a PR 6 to a PR 2. This domain still has home page links from .gov and .edu home pages, hundreds of other quality links and a bunch of comments, articles, forum profiles and so on. Other similar shifts were a couple pr 4′s and 5′s dropping to zero or one. nothing dropped to NA.

The Substantial Gain:

On the flip side I also have multiple examples of domains making erratic shifts in an upward direction, a have practically brand new domain that I purchased in February and put content up on only about a month ago and I am talking only 20 odd pages of unique content. This domain went from a PR0 to a PR5!!! I also have other domains showing increased from a PR of 1 and 2 to 4 and 5…

If anyone want visual proof of this stuff then let me know I can email you the domains, I am not inclined to list them here to keep my network a secret.

Summary:

Believe me when I say that this is not at all inline with what had occurred in the past, Google has definitely thrown a spanner in the works, luckily for me I am a jack of all trades and

How Redundant is this now?

a spanner is just what I needed.

What does all this mean? well at first I was a little upset about it all, no longer being able to rely on PR to determine a domains authority would make it hugely difficult for me to

broker quality links but then I got to thinking, I never really did that in the first place. I have always accessed a domain on other factors high PR was simply an indicator or a flag that drew me towards the domains that would most likely have the variables I was after by the bucket load.

In no particular order these are some of the times I would be looking for to locate a good quality authoritative domain:

• DMOZ, Google, Yahoo and other authority directory listings
• Number of Inbound Links
• Type of Inbound Links e.g: .gov and .edu links, blog comments, forum profiles, home page links, site wide links and so on
• Social Presence
• Domain Age
• Number Of Archives (this is a really important one)
• Number Of Registered Drops and Registrants In The Domain History
• Alexa Rank (low importance)
• Content

There may be some adjustments to PR over the coming days/weeks while things settle down, however I feel this is unlikely, my gut feeling is that this was calculated move by

Google and a smart one. By throwing doubt into the link builders minds about PR they have also reduced link builders ability to manually manipulate search results with quality

links, how are people going to know what sites are high quality without high levels of due diligence? how will anyone be able to purchase high authority expiring domains when 99% of people are basing their purchase off PR alone both of the site they are buying and the PR of the inbound links of the sites linking to it? It all becomes unreliable information!

For me there is now a need to automate the domain assessment process beyond and possibly even excluding domain PR. A tool that could access all o

f the above mentioned points and filter out domains that dont meet my criteria would be ten times more valuable now than it was before and I would not be surprised if some of these come to the market over the coming months. Let me know if you’ve got one .

Something is going on with this update, massive shifts in PR have occurred on multiple of my domains that have been stable over the last 3-4 updates in 2010, additionally I don’t think that they have all been hit up yet.
Most of my domains received an increase including my online surveys domain, going up to a PR4 from PR0.

I believe the main thing that is holding the PR of my domains in place (or increasing them in many cases) would be the large number of high PR in content home page links that each of them have.
From a fairly quick observation, the old saying that “the PR of your site cannot exceed the PR of your highest in bound link” still remains true. After running an inbound link report on a couple of the domains that lost PR, I can see that they have dropped to the same level as the highest PR link pointing to them e.g. one of my PR6 domains that’s highest PR links is multiple PR5′s (including .gov links) has dropped to PR5. Same case applies on the domains I have seen increase.

I will post more on this later but for now go check your site out and see what the PR is. I would be interested to hear how your sites have moved and what you feel was the reason it shifted in either direction.

As much as I hate referring to Google algorithm updates the recent changes made by Google coinciding with the Panda update have heavily effected search results, more than I have seen in the last couple years anyway.

Every man and his dog has written about how the most recent changes have effected content, the general gist being that people with duplicate content (across multiple domains) or weak content will have less probability to achieve anything significant and so they shouldn’t, there is nothing worse than hitting site after site with useless content.

But what has the effect of these changes had on link building? Does anyone care? In the 50+ SEO/Online Marketing related RSS feeds I subcribe to I have seen little to nothing about it!

So What Did Change?

The most significant change (that hit Australia only 2 weeks ago) has been sever penalties to sites with low link variation. Basically anyone who practised solely low quality link building e.g. forum profiles, blog commenting and so on and did not put in the effort to create solid properties at the same pace. Even when filtered through web 2.0 properties.

What Still Works?

Near everything still works just as it used to in my experience, with the exception of Forum profiles, low quality mass blog comments and strait up footer links/theme sponsorship type links have taken a dive on their previous ability to impact rankings. These should only have been a very small and insignificant part of your link building strategy anyway.

As for the link building factors that are now receiving more weight there is only two:

• Social Media
• Links Embedded In Slabs Of Content (not even necessarily relevant content).

Cool Twitter Badge. USE IT!

An important note on the above two points is that I am not referring to low quality mass social and in content links, I am talking about quality. Facebook and Twitter profiles with hundreds of followers, links in quality unique content on authoritative domains (so no, not article marketing).

All of my sites demonstrating these above factors in abundance without exception have made significant ranking improvements without any recent alternate link building or content for that matter.

Lastly the ranking shifts seem to be coming a lot slower but consistent improvements can still be had with the right variation. High PR home page links and utilising web 2.0 properties are still the ducks nuts when it comes to building solid domain authority.

My car is done so more on this later…

Looking Shmick

If they continue to improve at this rate we will be rolling with the best in no time at all.

Two people really made this conference worth while. Susan Bartton and Dave Cupples both delivered enthusiastic and engaging presentation packed with valuable information not only for affiliate marketers but for anyone who’s anyone online.

I will only give a very brief summary of each of these guys and spend the majority of my time listing the great valuable tools they provided because I know that’s what I would want less fluff and opinion more good stuff.

Susan Bratton:

Susan discussed the topic of persuasion marketing, the process of maximising your content to get the job done. Every word Susan uttered was backed with solid case studies and big

Robert Cialdini - Image via Wikipedia

names including the likes of Robert Cialdini, Mark Joyner, Bob Stone and lastly Ross Jeffries a well know Author and self help guru who is a master in the art of utilising NLP to pick up women, a lot of his theories and material was scattered throughout her presentation which was something I could relate to being an enthusiast of the pick up artist type psychology and techniques myself, many underestimate the knowledge and insight these guys have in human behavior.

The good Stuff:

Her entire presentation (35 minute video which I highly recommend) and all of the material she references can be found here: Conversion Triggers

Two quotes that I have taken away:

• ?“If you get the structure right you can make mistakes but it will still get the job jone”
• “?Start by asking what is your customers problem”

Dave Cupples:

This guy knows his stuff, both from seeing him speak and catching up with him afterward Dave has been gifted with multiple opportunities to travel the globe listening and working with the best. His chosen topic was how to monetize social media, however much like Susan his material went way beyond the scope of just that and again would have been valuable for anyone with a presence online. he provided the audience with a huge arsenal of tips, tricks and most importantly tools to make as mach impact in as little time as possible, which suits me just fine. He is also a big fan of the guys at “Shoemoney” which in my experience have bucket loads of awesome information and results to back it up.

Some Of The Good Stuff:

I am not inclined to reveal it all just yet, I am saving some of the good stuff for myself for now I will gradually post up some of the other tools after I have tested the for myself. This will both keep the tools secret for a little longer and keep you eager to come back for more… well I hope anyway.

Here is a strait up link to Dave blog, please dont judge him on the design and layout of the blog, it is in no way congruent with him and his advice (if your reading this Dave, your site could do with some design work man).

Automated Twitter Follower Tool:

There is just too much to write about this tool, I will say its pretty awesome and you should definitely check it out.
http://tweetadder.com/

Google Search Suggestion Keyword generator:

Whether you like it not people are starting to use keyword suggestions given by not only all major search engines but most major websites. Searches are being trained what to tyoe before they have even completed the first word. This tool will help you generate hundreds of possible variations on keywords in your niche.

http://suggest.thinkpragmatic.net/

Making Social Stuff Go Viral:

This social site will help you to seed updates out to the general public by presenting your updates to influential and proactive social media people.
www.quora.com

Content Suggestion Plugin

If you read my previous blog post A Page Worth A Million Dollars you already know I am a huge believer in adding all types of different content/media to pages as often as possible, this is the best tool I have come across in helping you do so. It will automatically suggest relevant content as you type.

Whats a plugin recommendation without a screen shot:

The bottom “in text links” section gives suggestion for pages you you can link to strait from the content. I used it 3-4 times throughout this article. the right hand side suggests media from both external sources or your own websites that you can manually configure.

One word of caution when using this tool however is that it very sneakily adds a link to the bottom of each post you use it on as you can see in the bottom right. Not that I dont encourage people to promote the plug in, you may choose to leave it out on some posts.

That should keep you busy for a while. Let me know if you have any questions.

Peace,

Si